Hannah
And then it was out.
She looked at Niamh and then around, searching faces. ‘Know what?’
‘About you and Jason O’Riordan.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Nicole asked.
‘Tell us now,’ Niamh said – demanded, really.
Hannah stuck to the headlines. Last November she met a guy at a thing.
In January he started coming into the shop.
(‘What’s a book brush?’ Jill interrupted, and Tara silenced her with a look that could have felled trees.) Three hundred euro or so worth of Curated stock later, he asked her to dinner.
She went. She had a nice time, they did it again, repeat as required.
Two weeks ago, he told her he was married, technically and miserably.
Divorcing wasn’t going to be simple, but he was working on it.
‘And that’s it,’ she said.
But her audience was still staring at her expectantly, eyes gleaming, like a pack of hyenas circling injured, juicy prey.
‘So you’re …?’ Nicole slowly raised her eyebrows until they could go no further. ‘Still with him?’
‘He’s left her,’ Hannah said. ‘Effectively.’
Meaningful glances flew around the room like arrows.
‘But how did you—?’ Jill started.
Niamh, talking over her, said, ‘How could you not have known?’
‘I’m single,’ Hannah said. ‘I knew that.’
‘But didn’t you wonder why you never saw him during the week?’
A distant alarm rang inside Hannah’s head.
‘How do you know I didn’t see him during the week?’
Niamh flushed, looked away.
‘Peter says they’re opening a Shreddr in Limerick,’ Jill said. ‘That’s where he told his wife he was every weekend. If anyone called looking for him, the staff were told to say nothing except that he’d call them back.’
‘Sorry, but …’ Hannah shook her head, disbelieving. ‘Where are you getting all this?’
‘Peter,’ Jill said. ‘I just said.’
‘But where is he getting it?’
Nicole, sitting next to Hannah, reached out to put a hand on her arm.
‘Everyone’s talking about it, Han,’ she said quietly. ‘The whole company knows.’
Her cheeks burned at the thought.
‘The only person who doesn’t know,’ Niamh snapped, ‘is her.’
‘It’s up to him to tell his wife,’ Hannah said. ‘This isn’t just about his marriage, it’s about his business. His future. His life. I trust him to make the right decision at the right time – and telling her right now isn’t it.’
Tara rolled her eyes. ‘Says the mistress.’
Mistress. The word was the sudden, violent lash of a leather belt, snapping hard and taut against Hannah’s bare skin, leaving what felt like a red, burning welt.
She was so stunned that, for a moment, she couldn’t breathe.
‘Sorry,’ Niamh said. ‘But maybe you needed to hear that.’
‘I didn’t,’ Hannah spat back.
A thick, suffocating silence settled over the room.
Bodies shifted with discomfort, eyes fixed on barely touched glasses of wine held with two hands, lips pursed.
And then, with a thunderbolt, Hannah understood what was actually going on.
They hadn’t brought her here to entertain them with juicy details of the man she finally had in her life. The invite had been a summons. She was expected to explain herself, to defend her actions. She’d been subpoenaed to appear before a court of Marrieds. Hannah was on trial for her sins.
‘I. Was. Single,’ she said now, enunciating each word. ‘He said he was. It’s not my job to verify that. It’s his job to tell the truth.’
‘But you must have known,’ Jill protested. ‘Or at least suspected?’
‘Didn’t you ask?’ Tara wailed.
‘We have a responsibility,’ Niamh said. ‘To each other.’
‘What about his responsibility?’ Hannah said, shouting now.
‘Seeing as he was the one who married someone?’ She was losing her composure, which she hated, but she was getting so bloody annoyed with them and their piousness.
‘Why am I being shamed here? Are you seriously blaming me for a grown man deciding to step outside of his marriage?’ She paused to take a breath, which was nowhere near as deep or calming as it needed to be.
‘Which, by the way, was already over bar the paperwork.’
‘According to him,’ Tara muttered under her breath.
Hannah fixed her with her hardest stare and said, ‘Oh fuck off, Tara.’
Jill gasped at this as if she were in a pantomime.
‘Everyone needs to calm down,’ Niamh said in a gratingly soothing tone. ‘We’re just trying to—’
‘Oh, I’m perfectly calm.’ Hannah stood up.
‘I’ve just had enough of this. And I don’t mean this interrogation or intervention or whatever the fuck it’s supposed to be.
I mean of you. Of all of you. Of this so-called friendship group.
Because I don’t think any of you have the first clue what it actually means to be a friend.
’ She banged down her glass, grabbed her bag and moved to go – but by now the anger was bubbling to a boil and she couldn’t seem to turn the heat down.
She reeled on them. ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like to be your friend?
What I’ve had to put up with? The absolute, mind-numbing shite I’ve had to listen to and pretend to care about?
And God, it was so worth it, seeing as the whole time you were treating me like I barely existed, like I’m some sort of ghost, because I didn’t make the same boring, uninspired, terrible choices that you—’
‘Just because,’ Nicole said loudly, ‘we didn’t make your choices doesn’t mean we didn’t make choices of our own.
’ She was standing up now, too. ‘But that never even occurs to you, Han, does it? You just cannot deal with the fact that we might have exactly what we wanted, that we got it, while you’re still out there trying to figure out what the hell it is that you want.
You think you’re so inspiring and exciting and living your best life.
Give me a fucking break. If we do anything, it’s pity you, Han. We fucking pity you.’
In the almost two decades they’d known each other, Hannah had never heard Nicole speak with such venom in her voice.
That took her by surprise before the words stunned her into silence.
Momentarily.
‘Sure,’ Hannah said mockingly. ‘I’m sure that’s it, yeah.
That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?
Pity. Because it couldn’t be fear, right?
You couldn’t possibly be afraid that I’ll ruin it all for you, too?
’ She moved to go. ‘Well, you can rest easy. I wouldn’t bother my arse with any of your fucking husbands. ’
There was still only silence behind her as she strode into Jill’s hall, yanked open the front door and slammed it as hard as she could behind her.
Her brother found out and told her mother on what was probably the greatest day of his whole entire life.
Mary went straight into a tailspin of crossing herself, murmuring the names of various saints and complaining that she was having a ‘weakness’, a medical condition whose only known cure involved collapsing into the nearest chair and having someone bring you a whiskey.
‘Could you not find an unmarried one?’ she wailed at Hannah.
‘I thought I did.’
‘But you must have known. You’re not stupid, Han. You’re many things, but you’re not that.’
Hannah ignored the inferred insult and focused on the blatant one.
‘I didn’t know, Mam. And, honestly? I didn’t care. He didn’t say he was married, and I’m single.’
‘Oh, we know that, love.’
‘This isn’t my fault.’
‘You’ll have to go to confession.’
‘For what? Forgive me, Father, because someone else broke his vows?’
‘You helped him do it.’
‘They’re not my vows.’
‘They never leave the wife, you know that?’
‘How would you know? Ever since Dad died you’ve been sitting in this house waiting for death to come.’
Her mother rolled her eyes. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the dramatics.’
‘Mam, can I just point out one tiny thing to you? I’m thirty-three. Almost thirty-four.’
‘What’s your point? Time is running out so you have to resort to stealing someone’s husband, break up a family?’
‘They don’t have kids.’
‘They’re still a family. They’re a part of his family and her family, aren’t they?’
Hannah couldn’t actually believe her ears. ‘Did you …?’ She regarded her mother with incredulity. ‘Did you seriously just …?’
‘What?’ her mother said innocently.
‘I’m almost thirty-four,’ Hannah repeated weakly.
‘Indeed you are.’ Her mother drained her whiskey and waved her empty glass at Hannah’s brother, who’d been standing in the kitchen doorway the entire time, watching them with a smug smile on his face. ‘Old enough to know better, I thought.’
One random weeknight, her phone lit up at 2.10 a.m. Jason sounded weird, his words thick and slightly slurred. He was at the house, his, in Dundrum. And he wanted her to meet him there, right now.
‘It’s the middle of the night,’ she protested. ‘And I have to be at the shop at eight in the morning.’
‘I need to see you,’ he said. ‘It can’t wait.’
Hannah was still lying down and hadn’t turned on a light.
She had absolutely no intention of getting out of her own warm, comfortable bed to drive in the dark to the thin, single-sized mattress and unwashed sheets Jason had thrown on the floor of the bedroom over there in case he ever needed to crash.
Not to mention the seventies nightmare she’d have to shower in afterwards, or having to try to find parking anywhere near the place.
‘Aren’t we a bit old for this?’ she said.
‘Hannah, I need to talk to you.’
‘We’re talking now.’
‘In person.’
‘Then come to me.’
‘I can’t drive.’
‘Take a taxi.’
‘Hannah, for fuck’s sake, will you just shut up and come here!’
She sat up in the darkness, disoriented by the key change. She’d never heard him shout before. He’d never spoken to her like that, not once.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just—’
‘I think it’s best if I hang up. I’ll talk to you in the morning.’
‘I cut myself.’
‘What?’